Mt Kosciuszko

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Today we drove across to Thredbo from Cooma. But first it was an early morning trip over the road to Tyrepower to see about the screw in the tyre. Fortunately, the screw seemed to be plugging the hole it had made and the tyre had not gone flat overnight. Bernie had it over to Tyrepower just after 8.00am … and wasn’t the first person in with a puncture!! What is with the state of NSW roads?? Unless it’d been in the tyre since Melbourne … Drouin … Marlo?? Who knows?!

The tyre guy told Bernie he could have it fixed in half an hour, so Bernie headed back across the road to eat breakfast while the plug was being done. Whoa, barely fifteen minutes later and Bernie had the call to say the tyre was fixed. Now that’s good service.

Secure in the knowledge that our tyre was not going to leak or blow out, we set out for Thredbo. We took the Kosciuszko Road around the southern end of Lake Jindabyne before turning onto the Alpine Way and then Friday Drive which took as into the Thredbo Resort. With the development of downhill mountain biking as a summer sport the village is almost as busy at this time of year as it is in the winter. It’s great that the resort enjoys visitors almost year-round these days and there was certainly no shortage of mountain bikers and sightseers today.

Bernie had pre-booked for us to take the chairlift up to Eagles Nest where the Kosciuszko Walk begins. We exchanged our vouchers for our lift passes and headed to the Kosciuszko Chairlift - along with all the crazy mountain bikers – and found ourselves on the flank of Australia’s highest peak in no time at all.

The Kosciuszko Walk takes the form of a raised boardwalk. It’s a lovely, wide and flat walkway BUT … it’s all uphill. We hiked to the Kosciuszko Lookout as planned (that would have been 4km return from Eagles Nest) but then we hiked a bit further because someone wanted to hike a little bit further towards Etheridge Gap. Why do I agree to these things? We ended up walking nearly 10km all up by the time we returned to the truck!!

Actually, the walk was easy but for the steep sections and even those weren’t too bad … as far as we went. Before we get too much older, we should return and stay closer to the mountain and hike all the way to the summit?? Staying an hour away from Thredbo took a couple of hours out of the day to start with making it a bit unrealistic to hike all the way to the summit. That and not having packed lunch and drinks to be properly prepared for a 13km (4-6 hour) hike.

The wind was cool up on the mountain and there were some dark clouds around, but it remained mostly sunny for our outdoor adventure. That would probably be because we were carrying our raincoats! Still, it was much better to have our coats in case it rained than be drenched halfway through our walk. The wind chill factor would have made that very uncomfortable.

At least it was mainly downhill on the way back to Eagles Nest Restaurant where we ate a late lunch at Australia’s highest restaurant. The restaurant was still busy when we arrived, and we had a short wait for a table and then had to pop on the end of a table where another diner was just finishing up. The prosciutto pizza was excellent!

On the way back to Cooma we HAD to take a side trip to Adaminaby to photograph the Big Trout!! We drove back around the southern end of Lake Jindabyne to Berridale where we turned off onto Middlingbank Road to head north. At the Snowy Mountains Highway, we turned left and took the B72 into Adaminaby. There’s not much else in town so once we had our shots of the Big Trout it was back into the car to head south on the Snowy Mountains Highway back to Cooma.

With the weather continuing fine this evening we walked over to Rose’s Restaurant where we enjoyed a delicious Lebanese meal. Bernie had noted that it scored well (4.7) on Google, and it didn’t disappoint. The meal sizes were really good with both of us choosing options that left us full but not stuffed!

No problems achieving our goals today!!



Steps: 17,608 (11.61kms)

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